Mozilla pushes Thunderbird development to community

Mozilla has announced that it will no longer develop its own mail client Thunderbird. Instead, the company wants to get the community involved in working on the software.

In a blog post Mozilla has an explanation datum about choosing to take a step back from Thunderbird’s development. According to the company, the mail client would mainly need maintenance and security updates, while there are hardly any more innovative features to develop. Therefore, the community could take over the development, with guidance from Mozilla. Also, more and more people are using web-based mail clients, which is why Mozilla’s open source client is losing popularity.

According to Mozilla, there will be so-called ‘Extended Support Releases’ of Thunderbird in the future, where the developer will support it with patches for a period of time, mainly addressing major security holes. Mozilla has an overview online set of these future Thunderbird releases. Version 13 of the mail client was released last month.

Mozilla wants to focus more on other projects. The company has recently developed a lot of software for mobile devices, including mobile versions of the Firefox browser and the Boot2Gecko mobile operating system; the first smartphones with the OS should be released next year.